Reviews
Hellman, Judith Adler
Tunnel to Canto Grande: The Story of the Most Daring Prison Escape in Latin American History by Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll, Curbstone Press, 1996, 193 pp., $12.95 (paper). On July 9,...
...The MRTA bought a plot of vacant land on the outskirts of the prison, built a house on it, and then began the Herculean task of excavating a tunnel through the boulder-strewn, compacted earth...
...Thus, the heart of the book is devoted to a case study focusing on the efforts of the Reagan administration to win support for the contra war-both in Congress and among the general population...
...He uses Reagan's policy towards Nicaragua to illustrate the role of the myth in the formulation of policy...
...To do this, he looks at an intriguing array of sources including political cartoons and editorials in the mainstream media, political speeches and press briefings, State Department documents, and congressional testimony...
...They came away with 55 hours of tape, which they cobbled together into this fast-paced, insider's account of the escapade...
...Having set out the elements central to the construction of the myth, Kenworthy goes on to demonstrate how these ideas are promoted, sustained and reinforced to the point that they come to shape relations in the hemisphere...
...Focusing on the "founding" myths that have always underpinned the assertion of U.S...
...hegemony in Latin America...
...The last concept-a negative one-is that the advances in civilization brought about under U.S...
...The escape was quite a feat...
...hegemony in the hemisphere, Kenworthy looks at four recurrent ideas that form the basis of what he considers to be the "America/ Americas Myth...
...The flip side of the story concerns how the prisoners-including Polay in the maximum-security pavilion-could so easily elude their captors once the tunnel broke through the surface...
...The authors detail how the tight security procedures which had been followed when Canto Grande first opened in 1986 unravelled as a result of budget constraints, overcrowding and corruption...
...America/Ambricas: Myth in the Making of U.S...
...The second is that "freedom" and "progress" and, more recently, "democracy" are linked to advances in material well-being, and are all outcomes of the heroic intervention of these European actors and their descendents...
...foreignpolicy goals based on the four founding elements of the myth...
...On July 9, 1990, 48 political prisoners from the Ttipac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA)-including the group's leader Victor Polay Campo-escaped from the Canto Grande penitentiary through a 330-yard tunnel that their compaheros on the outside had dug into the prison compound...
...In a remarkable achievement, Kenworthy manages to make discourse theory-so often presented by others in a manner both arid and incomprehensible-at once meaningful and accessible...
...The third idea is that the civilizing project began and still excels in the United States and that the country must, therefore, be the vanguard of the region, and by extension, of the entire world...
...it had a ventilation system, lighting, and a stuccoed roof and timber frame to prevent cave-ins...
...Policy Toward Latin America by Eldon Kenworthy, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, 189 pp., $35.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper...
...Nonetheless, the book is a gripping pageturner replete with close calls, personal conflicts, and a dramatic denouement...
...At times, their earnestness gives a schmaltzy quality to the story that can be off-putting...
...In this fascinating study, Eldon Kenworthy uses a highly original and effective mixture of approaches to provide fresh insights into the forces that shape U.S.-Latin American relations...
...The tunnel was not a primitive rabbit hole...
...Six weeks after the escape, Nicaraguan poet Claribel Alegrfa and her husband Darwin Flakoll spent a week with the guerrillas in a secret safe house...
...A team of diggers--15 at its peak-took almost three years to accomplish the task...
...Kenworthy breaks new ground by applying semiotics to explore the hidden strategies, manipulation, and control of public opinion that are necessary to sustain U.S...
...leadership necessarily provoke the emnity of the old world, which may endanger the hemisphere's security...
...In Kenworthy's analysis, these sources constitute a kind of "advertising" that promotes U.S...
...The first of these ideas, ignoring all evidence of indigenous culture, is that the western hemisphere was a blank slate on which God wrote a page of human history with Europeans as central protagonists...
...Alegria and Flakoll are unapologetically sympathetic to the MRTA...
Vol. 30 • July 1996 • No. 1
